radio study 2 (a flux where the body always is), 2019

Video (performance), enacted in/ projected onto water located in/sourced from the James River in Richmond, Virgina, 3/26/19. Crates, laptop. Live radio streams from six past homes, transmitted through headphones into a jug half-full of water sourced from the same river, same day. Contact microphones, speakers, assorted cords and cables. Photos of past homes, tape.

I’m not sure what a goodbye looks like to something that never completely existed. Or that flickered. The place existed and continues. The imagining lived in those denser and more fragrant parts of the place— wet, glossy, humming. Weighty, like kelp on land. I think I imagined a home for myself there but it is after all a river so these things do not stay put. It is after all just water and as such absorbs sound in a way that is both captivating and perilous. The way it dulls sound and folds it onto itself again. The way it deadens externalities, turns time into a soft thing.

In the space of this installation, I have cast the milk jug of river water as myself— a few inches underwater, hearing the deadened imprints of several places at once and wanting this river to be all of them. Through the installation I hope to ritualize, examine, and surrender this past plea that Richmond, VA (my place of residence 2010-2014, my nuclear family's place of residence, the source site for this jug of water) hold more than what it can, or something other than what it does.